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Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

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Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#261

Post by yowlingcat »

fxtentacle wrote: post #64
stewsnooze wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you find your marketing contractor? What were they doing?

I met the marketing guy through a business brunch that the DC (a club for online marketers) was organizing every 2 weeks in Saigon back in 2015. What he did was mostly to reply to whatsapp messages and to grant free bikinis to Instagram influencers. One particularly good angle was yoga teachers. They'd usually be doing retreats at exotic locations and posting inspirational photos multiple times per day. Plus the yoga…

I guess it all makes sense once you spell it out like this, but I suppose that for the long tail after the really popular influencers, it really is a buyers market. Did you use any influencer marketing platforms to manage your influencer representatives, or did you do it pretty manually?

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#262

Post by zatel »

CrackpotGonzo wrote: post #74

It’s very small at the moment, but I built a simple way to stand up a landing page, collect payment, and send out a link. Primarily have yoga instructors using this as a better way to collect payment for Zoom classes compared to collecting payment on Venmo or using another tool they’re not comfortable with such as Gumroad. Only charging .6% on top of Stripe’s fees and no monthly. Only making a little money at the mom…

this is a really inspiring little payment processor

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#263

Post by yowlingcat »

CrackpotGonzo wrote: post #158
mrfusion wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it better than gumroad?

Yogis and fitness instructors I've spoken to see Gumroad as being too "techie" and the few that have tried it felt it was more geared towards selling online assets, rather than live classes. For now it's very basic, but I'm working on a few features that are specifically geared to helping live class creators sell more easily, primarily calendar integration, support for multiple classes being sold, and support for mon…

Wow, fascinating how important branding is with payment collection. I wonder if the same is true for other kinds of small businesses outside of the fitness vertical.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#264

Post by widforss »

awillen wrote: post #2

I really don't like talking about my side projects, so I guess they all qualify, but I'm particularly excited about one at the moment. Right now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's real…

I love the idea, and will see if I'm able to buy some later. But trans-atlantic shipment and tariffs adds up, unfortunately. And I'm unsure if customs would let animalia get into the EU without special license.

Edit: I see now that your comments indicate that you're US only. Just to make sure you're aware, your site calculates and suggests shipping to Europe.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#265

Post by Melting_Harps »

awillen wrote: post #2

I really don't like talking about my side projects, so I guess they all qualify, but I'm particularly excited about one at the moment. Right now I'm working on a dog treat business - I make a treat mix that you add water to and freeze for a meat-based frozen treat. I feel really good about the product and the packaging design (and this is the first time I've ever worked on any kind of a physical product, so it's real…

> Right now I'm working on a dog treat business

Interesting, I'm a chef (ex?) and a friend of mine wanted to start a dog food company in 2016-17 but never got around to it. Your approach looks pretty straight forward, for some reason I thought you'd have to be at a commissary kitchen and have food handlers paperwork on top off all the stuff you mentioned.

I'll share your link with them and maybe they get re-interested, do you have any interest in a collaboration for dog food in the future? Provided it met your standards etc...

I actually wanted to see if we could do it entirely upcycling the loss in food waste in the supply chain and restaurants as I know that Industry well and have made efforts to try and reduce as much as possible. I honestly would take home multiple 3 pans full of high grade sashimi grade salmon from saute's prep, and at least 5 lbs of blood lined yellow fin tuna from my station every week.

I still have a bunch of it sitting in my freezer and I know tons of restaurants and farms are sitting on the same or more.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#266

Post by aj3 »

tomp wrote: post #231
aj3 wrote: post #207

Algotrading options. Some initial investment is needed in order to open margin account, but otherwise it's basically passive income.

I’m guessing that “passive income” means buying volatility & selling protection? If that’s what you’re doing, how did you fare in the recent Covid-related volatility spike?

I don't want to go into details on the strategies, but high volatility and high liquidity are great for options, especially for algotrading approaches ("picking up pennies in front of a steamroller"). This will be the most profitable year for many of us. In quiter times you can't get much better than the wheel, but right now certain approaches produce more than magnitude higher yields.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#267

Post by yowlingcat »

Xt-6 wrote: post #124

I made a tool to detect which user account can be safely remove from PagerDuty. It also provide simple weekly report emails. I got a few subscribers by doing nothing else that putting it on the PagerDuty marketplace. https://www.pagerinsights.com/

Very cool. I get the sense that with these kinds of Micro-SaaS type products, it's really important to leverage marketplaces. I've seen this with Shopify and AWS but I must admit, I wasn't even aware PagerDuty had a marketplace. Have you put your product into any other marketplaces besides PagerDuty?

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#268

Post by mdorazio »

muzani wrote: post #249

My wife sells lasagna. It makes really good money, could potentially make more than a good job, but I'm not sure if we'd like to commit to that. Profit margins are pretty good, but it's still poor $ per effort. COVID makes it a bad time too.

There are usually a lot of food regulations, fees, kitchen requirements, etc. if you're selling food in any kind of quantity. Is the lasagna venture profitable with all of that factored in? A couple friends of mine have attempted various food-oriented businesses and the margins have consistently been pretty awful.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#270

Post by latchkey »

teon wrote: post #109

We have been building on the side for quite some time a image enlarge/upscale service based on convolutional neural networks algorithms: https://deep-image.ai More details about the technology side: https://teonite.com/blog/deep-image-thanks-to-machine-learni... Now we’ve just launched payments - so we have to see some time about the results.

Interesting, do you need gpu compute on the backend?
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